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The Cycle of Consciousness

7-Year-Cycle: The Fundamentals of our Identity

Just as the 18-year cycle is the most fundamental for our energy and activity in life, the 7-year cycle is the most fundamental for our identity. It is from our identity that we judge the world, determine our values, discover our attractions and distractions, and understand our experience. However, when the cycle changes, we find that everything we valued or held as true for ourselves has changed. It affects our social identity. It changes the requirements and expectations we put on ourselves and others. It changes how we identify with our roles and responsibilities in our community and in our family.

Look at the 7-year cycle in groups of three. Birth to 21 makes up the three cycles that emphasize physical maturation. Our brains grow, prune themselves and specialize to serve our destiny and life. The frontal lobe and the more archaic portions of the brain are not fully mature and connected until about age 21. Each of the three 7-year cycles that compose this period emphasizes, in turn, more physical, emotional and mental/spiritual development.

From ages 21-42, emotional and social maturation is central: How productive we are, how connected with others, how much we learn about our efforts versus the flow of our spirit.

From 42-63 years, our successful maturation and identity is tested by our level of sensitivity, intuition, sense of purpose, clarity, and impact of ideas and ideals – by how we demonstrate our efficacy in the world.

Beyond that is the realm of spiritual and generational wisdom.

The increasing cycles of 7 expand us. They connect us to our increasing responsibilities and are a measure of our scope and caliber. They ask us to connect, grow, and finally, to allow the Infinite to move through us in each moment. The 7-year cycle has always been recognized as a chance for reassessment, for checking our compass to be sure we are proceeding to fulfillment and destiny, and as a moment of profound change.

The first 7-year cycle is pivotal in many ways. It sets the foundation of identity and consciousness. Yogi Bhajan emphasized the binding nature of the seventh year as we consolidate many aspects of our identity and our beliefs about our self, our worth, our relationships and our potential from infancy. How we emerge from this growth cycle and the mutuality of personality we experience with our caregivers affects much of our future. That is why the rebirthing meditations and meditations into shuniya are so helpful. They reset us, they give us a new birth and they free us from unnecessary constraints that are often established in that first 7-year cycle. It is in this period that we experience our first battle between the destiny in our soul, the inner daemon in our psyche and the self we acquire from our environments.

From The Aquarian Teacher: Life Cycles and Life Styles. KRI International Teacher Training in Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan. Level 2 Transformation Practitioner. Kundalini Research Institute. 2007.